Assassin’s Creed Unity DevBlog – Arno with Travis Stout

07/24/2014 09:00 AM

Learn more about our newest Assassin with Travis Stout

We managed pry our Single-Player Scriptwriter, Travis Stout, away from his keyboard and got him to tell us all about Arno Victor Dorian. Travis is in charge of the over-arching story of the main single-player experience of Unity. He writes all the dialogue for the single-player missions, develops the characters and the story arcs.

We started the interview with a question that fans have been asking since we released our teaser trailer in March: Have we misspelled our Assassin’s name?

“The spelling of Arno, A-R-N-O, is an older French/Germanic, I believe Frankish variation, of the name. It’s not as common as Arnaud but you still see it occasionally. It comes back to Arno’s family history. His family is a very old one and they’ve been Assassins for a very long time so we wanted to give him a slightly more antiquated name. Also, the phonetic spelling makes it easier to pronounce.”

There is nothing wrong with difficult names, right Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad and Ratonhnhaké:ton? But I digress, back to Arno!

#ArnoFacts: He is known to cheat at cards.

“He is a very driven young man. He is haunted by mistakes in his past or perceived mistakes, that he feels he must atone for. He is very devoted to the Assassin Order as an ideal but, at the same time, he is not as impressed with the weight of the long mystical tradition and ancient rhetoric as some of the other Assassins. He likes to think for himself and make his own decisions. He isn’t the type of person who will believe something just because someone tells it to him.”

“He is a very well educated young man. He was raised in a noble household and had access to tutors and books so he is very well-read. He has a habit of quoting the classics and tends to use humour to deflect when he is emotionally vulnerable, like a lot of people do I think. We very much wanted him to not be the sort of grizzled bad-ass spouting one-liners that you see in a lot of action movies. We wanted him to feel like an actual person.”

Travis Stout has been at Ubisoft for only a year but he has been working in the video game industry for the last decade. Before that he was working on table-top games like Dungeons and Dragons and the World of Darkness games.

You can hear more from Travis on The Network Podcast from Assassin’s Creed Initiates!